Anthropic has abruptly disabled access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models for all customers, just days after their launch on Friday. The decision follows a directive from the US Commerce Department received Friday evening, which subjects the new models to export controls restricting their use outside the United States.
Government Concerns Over Security Vulnerabilities
According to an Axios report citing an administration official, the US government expressed concern over reports of a jailbreak that could bypass safeguards designed to prevent Fable 5 from responding to prompts related to cybersecurity, chemistry, and biology. The administration reportedly requested a pause in the release of these models to allow national security agencies time to strengthen defenses against such threats, a process that could take several weeks.
Anthropic’s Response and Limited Evidence
In a statement posted Friday night, Anthropic explained that the only immediate way to comply with the government’s order was to disable the models for all users. The company noted that the government had provided only verbal evidence of a potential, narrow jailbreak. This jailbreak reportedly involves enabling Fable 5 to review a specific codebase for software flaws. Anthropic stated that it has only seen evidence of this jailbreak being used to identify minor vulnerabilities and that other publicly available models, such as GPT-5.5, possess similar capabilities.
Access to Anthropic’s other AI models remains unaffected by this action.
Helene Elliott is the senior reporter for News Raise. She covers Science news. She also has a keen interest in photojournalism. Helene holds a nomination for the prestigious Red Smith Award. She is married to author Dennis D’Agostino, a former publicist with the New York Mets.
